Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I often end up in this place, in this seat, while these debates are going on and I always resolve to myself: don't take the bait; just let it go; let other people make a contribution. As people may have noticed, I'm losing my voice this week. Probably I should just sit down but I cannot resist making a few gentle points in relation to the government's position on these questions.

Senator Kovacic just did a very good job of outlining the Peter Dutton and David Littleproud response to any challenging set of circumstances. If there is national interest involved, you can rely upon them to mount the most hollow, artisan, shallow response. Peter Dutton has transformed from being what the Liberal Party had hoped would be a credible and potential leader of an alternative government to just a negative press release machine. All he does is shout 'no' into the void. If there is a national interest question, you can always rely upon them, like they did this week on Future Made in Australia, to mount the most negative hyper partisan oppositional approach, not in the national interest.

Australians are doing it tough. What Peter Dutton, David Littleproud, Barnaby Joyce and all these characters do is say: 'If we could really mount the most negative proposition and hope for the worst. What we want is the worst thing to possibly happen. If Australians can lose, maybe we can see a narrow pathway to victory.' Maybe that is the political genius that sits behind this negative bottom-of-the-barrel, shallow hyper partisan set of propositions. Negativity defines the federal opposition these days. The Liberal and National parties are just roaming around the country shouting 'no' at every single constructive proposition.

The problem with that position is that Australians don't buy that argument, because Australians every day, in their families, are getting on with it. More Australians are participating in work. In this quarter, while the unemployment rate notched up by a decimal point, more Australians are in work in communities—Australians working together. You have Barnaby Joyce down here talking about bullets and ballots to an ever-diminishing groups of maddies holding demonstrations against wind turbines or whatever other piece of modern technology he wants to campaign against. He will campaign against phones soon. He is out there talking about bullets and ballots and all the sort of cooker-weirdo stuff that he goes on with.

But Australian communities want to see industrial development. They want to see investment. They want to see good jobs. They want to see the Australian government fighting for them and fighting for their communities. Communities are working together on these questions. Workers and businesses, trade unions and our research sector are working to build a stronger, better, more resilient and productive economy.

The country has a government that, rather than complaining about the state of things, is acting on the state of things. This government introduced tax cuts for every single Australian taxpayer—every single one. Those tax cuts deliver much bigger cuts for the majority of Australian taxpayers, particularly those at the middle and bottom end of the tax scales. For regional Australia, it means 90 per cent of Australian workers get a better deal from the Albanese government tax cuts than from the tax cuts Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton, Barnaby Joyce and David Littleproud supported.

On energy bill relief, let's not forget, just before the election, Mr Taylor, the character in the lower house who wants to be the Treasurer, concealed from the Australian people upcoming energy price rises. It was an act of total deceit, total bad faith, by a guy who really wants to be the Leader of the Liberal Party. Ever since then, there hasn't been an energy bill price rise that hasn't been celebrated by the Liberal and National parties. They love energy bill price rises because they're an opportunity for them to campaign in here. What has the government done? Well, last budget year we provided energy caps—caps on the price of coal and caps on the price of gas. We used a sophisticated mechanism to deliver that, sometimes through the states and territories. This time round we've provided $300 in energy bill relief.

On childcare costs, childcare workers got a 50 per cent wage increase, costs for parents have gone down by 11 per cent, and there's a cap on future price rises of just over four per cent. Rather than complaining about the cost of child care and positioning around the cost of child care, the government has simply done something about the cost of child care. On cheaper medicine—again, there's been a lot of complaining on the other side about the government's plans to reduce the cost of medicines for ordinary people, but we introduced cheaper medicine provisions.

Wages have gone up for minimum wage earners and for earners across the system. There's a lot of funny behaviour about wage increases in the Liberal and National parties. They just can't help themselves. They pull out the graph and have a look at how wage increases are going up and whether inflation is going up. Every time the inflation line nudges above the wages line, it's another victory. They get to say, 'That's not a real wage increase.' But the point is: wages are going up. There's an alternative model. Just imagine if wages had continued on the Cormann-Morrison-Turnbull-Abbott trajectory, bumping along the bottom. Imagine, if that had continued to occur, how far behind ordinary Australian workers would be today. The show over there complaining about real wage growth is like Idi Amin complaining about human rights abuses. It is really not credible.

On Medicare, there are Medicare urgent care clinics, dozens of the things, all around the country. On education costs, HECS bills have been reduced for ordinary students.

There are a couple of things that unite all of these measures. Firstly, they are good and they help ordinary families with the cost of living, but, secondly, they have all been opposed—and bitterly—by the Liberal and National parties. Those opposite voted against all of these propositions. They care so much about rises in the cost of living that they are prepared to do every single thing they can to help ordinary Australians with them—except voting for them, except actually doing anything about it. That is the problem with the Liberal and National party position. It so transparently hyperpartisan, so transparently not in the interests of ordinary Australians, so transparently just for their own interests and their own party room dynamics. It plays well in the party room to be oppositional and negative. It doesn't play well to actually propose a constructive solution. That's why I think that ordinary Australians, working hard to get through what is a tough period, can see through the negativity of the coalition. As Senator Gallagher said today, we started government with an inflation rate with a '6' in front of it; it now has a '3' in front of it. There is more work to do.

The other interesting thing about the coalition's position on this—and Senator Kovacic didn't really take us to this—is their complaints about government spending, their negativity about the government's role in the economy. This government delivered two back-to-back surpluses. We delivered those back-to-back surpluses because we have been a disciplined government that is focused on real cuts to spending where it is not in the national interest to continue spending and real cuts to programs where they haven't been in the national interest. In fact, we delivered two back-to-back surpluses, a surplus that the other side has never in living memory—16 or 17 years ago was the last time the government delivered a surplus. We have delivered it.

But the implication that the Dutton-Littleproud show cannot avoid is that, if you really believe that what the government should do is cut spending, then what you have to do is accept that—I know this is a difficult proposition for some on the other side to believe—if you advocate cutting spending you have to find some spending cuts. That's the way it works. If you want to reduce spending, you have to identify spending reductions. We haven't heard very much about that. The bulk of increases in the government's share of the economy has of course been about indexation for various payments. The largest of those is the age pension. Do Peter Dutton and David Littleproud want to cut the age pension? Do they want to cut child care, Medicare, the ABC, regional road funding, defence spending? Which of these programs do Mr Dutton, Mr Littleproud and Mr Taylor—the boys club that runs the show over there—have as their target for spending cuts? Whenever you put this position, they set their hair on fire and say, 'That's a terrible thing to say; we would never do such a thing,' except they always do it. It's their track record. The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. Their track record of promising not to cut spending and then immediately doing it on upon being elected is a very, very strong track record indeed.

What we should have been doing here this afternoon, instead of this juvenile, hyperpartisan motion about a misunderstanding of how the economy really works, is passing the government's legislation in relation to tidying up the construction and general branch of the CFMEU. That's what we should have been doing. We should have done it this week. We should have done it today. A deferral, not dealing with that legislation this afternoon—I know exactly who will be celebrating that outcome. There are three groups. Lawyers will spend a lot of taxpayers' money and a lot of CFMEU construction and general members' money trying to frustrate administration in the courts. It's good for the lawyers. It's good for those elements of the Liberal and National parties who have got control over the show over there, who love the negativity and who love the anti-union posturing. And it's good for Mr Setka and his friends. That's the truth.

What the construction industry is crying out for is a parliament that doesn't see its role as a sort of debating society but sees its role as taking action in the national interest. The construction industry needs that reform. It is the strongest possible reform that any government could mount. Instead, what we can look forward to is some of the more self-referential garbage that we saw in the debate earlier today, defending their legacy of failure for reform in this area, rooted in their own incapacity to see the public interest instead of the partisan interest. We will have to come back to this issue next week. But it is a real sign of the diminishing of the political capacity and the capacity of the opposition to see the national interest. (Time expired)